SkinNinja: This $4.5 Million App Spots Allergens And Cancer-Causing Ingredients In Your Skincare

Jo Osborne, founder at Sciapps and SkinNinja.Photo courtesy of Sciapps.

Do you know what Bromopol is? How about Quaternium-15? Unless you’re a scientist, probably not.

Yet these are just two of many complicated ways cosmetic companies list the known cancer-causing ingredient formaldehyde—yes, that’s the poisonous chemical best known for embalming dead bodies in funeral homes.

Carcinogens aren’t the only potentially harmful ingredient that could be hiding in your daily skin regime. Parabens, allergens and other toxic chemicals can have as many as 20 different names making them difficult to spot, especially as there are no legal meanings for “hypoallergenic” or “dermatologically tested,” which are so often slapped on products.

The SkinNina app.Photo courtesy of Sciapps.

This is why Jo Osborne created SkinNinja, a free smartphone app that identifies the true contents of your makeup bag to help you make informed decisions. Decisions that could be useful whether you have allergies, you’re pregnant or are a vegan who wants to avoid animal products.

“We want to empower everyone to make better decisions about what skin-care products are right for their own body and their own health,” says Osborne, who’s just closed a $1 million funding round led by the U.K.’s first women-run female-focused VC, Voulez Capital. This brings her company valuation to $4.5m.

“75% of people don’t understand what’s in their skincare, but 69% of people want to know.”

Inspired by her own skin cancer struggle

While ingredients like formaldehyde are perfectly legal to include in products in small doses, it’s easy to understand why Osborne—who was diagnosed with skin cancer at 26—doesn’t want carcinogens hidden in any part of her beauty regime.

What you might see if you scan your toothpaste.Photo courtesy of Sciapps.

The fair-skinned redhead was just 7 years old and growing up in Australia when her family realized she had an allergy to an unidentifiable ingredient in sunscreen: an allergy that meant she often went without, and undoubtedly led to her later cancer diagnosis.

Even now, when she’s bought products labeled “100% Aloe Vera” to soothe skin flare-ups, she later discovered they have carcinogens lurking within. “It’s shocking, I’m trying to fight my pre-cancers with a cancer-causing ingredient,” she explains.

“I feel I’ve used up all my cancer lives, so even if a product has a little bit of something carcinogenic in it, I want to know, so that the decision to use it or not can be mine.”

How SkinNinja works

Osborne hopes that her company Sciapps (short for Scientific Applications) and her app SkinNinja will help everyone gain transparency on what’s in their skincare.

To use it, you simply scan a product barcode with your smartphone, and this pulls up an overview of potentially harmful ingredients with a green-amber-red chart.

You can learn more about what’s in your products.Photo courtesy of Sciapps.

Those who want to dig deeper can click “learn more” to identify exactly which specific ingredients may place them at risk. And the app even lists alternative “free-from” products with links to buy them from pharmacies and supermarkets (SkinNinja takes its cut from the retailer).

“There's a perception that a lot of products without these ingredients are inaccessible or expensive, and actually that's not true,” says Osborne, who previously worked in price comparison and sold her company to Google. “It's just a case of getting the right data, and pairing people up with the right retailers and the right switches.”

The only downside is that uploading all the skincare products in the entire world is a lengthy task (when I scanned my bathroom’s contents, about a third of products were not yet listed on the app).

But it’s still easy to see SkinNinjas potential, and if your favorite face cream isn’t one of the 850,000 products on file, or includes an ingredient not listed in SkinNinja’s 237,000-strong database, you can take a picture and report it back to the Sciapps team for analysis.

All the information on the app is evidence-based and cites its sources, something Osborne—who trained as a lawyer—believes is crucial.

“I love evidence, and I'm equally passionate about consumer empowerment. Education and giving people the tools to make their own decision is the only way forward.”

The future for SkinNinja

Getting SkinNinja up and running hasn’t been easy. In addition to the common startup challenges that come with bootstrapping and raising angel investment, Osborne had to close her latest fundraise while enduring the effects of chemotherapy.

“Treatment while raising was hard,” she notes. “I got all the symptoms of cold and flu and had constant brain fog, as well as scabs over half my face.”

Yet Osborne did close the round successfully, including backing from the likes of Simon Morris (a director at Amazon), Mark Livingstone (cofounder of Lovefilm) and digital marketing guru Colin Gillespie.

The funding will go towards getting more products uploaded, making the app even more personalizable, and building product photo recognition tools.

“A lot of us get our products and immediately throw out the box so we don't have the barcode anymore,” says Osborne. “We’d like to fix that in the next 12 months.”

Beyond this, the founder hopes to start guiding cosmetics brands and retailers on what ingredients people want to use and how to clearly list them.

“The whole premise is to democratize this data,” says Osborne. “We don't want to make enemies in the industry, we want to partner with people so that we can make sure together we can help retailers attract the right audience.”

The future could even be one where you opt in or out of ingredients when you shop for products online, Osborne predicts.

If the road ahead sounds tough, Osborne’s skin cancer is a permanent reminder of just her how important her mission is. “I do wonder if it would have been different for me if I had SkinNinja growing up,” she says.

Time to see what’s really hiding on your bathroom shelf today?

Kitty writes about startups with a focus on promoting female founders and diversity in business. She's excited by tech innovation in health, education, retail, design and sustainable living. Before joining Forbes Kitty was published by lifestyle leaders like The Memo, GQ.co....